Paleogeographic analysis and reconstruction of prehistoric sedimentary basins plays a key role in the field of petroleum geology, because prehistoric geomorphological environments of the Earth's crust are preserved in stratigraphic records that may indicate whether hydrocarbon deposits, such as crude oil and/or natural gas, may be present.
Paleogeographic experts may also collect evidence from fossils, bottom samples and stratigraphic records to develop paleogeographic theories regarding prehistoric continental drift and plate tectonic movements, to reconstruct prehistoric continents, such as Pangaea, and oceans, such as Panthalassa, including their shapes and latitudinal and longitudinal locations during prehistoric times, such as the Middle Devonian period of about 385 Million years ago (Ma).
In conventional paleogeographic reconstruction techniques a geospatial dataset relating to an Area Of Interest (AOI) would generally be rotated to positions in the past using a plate model. Based on this paleo tectonic reconstruction a manual selection area may be identified and unreconstructed to present day to be co-analyzed with other present day datasets.
A downside of this conventional approach is the vast amount of information (data) that needs to be reconstructed to the past and unreconstructed to present day.
Alternatively, a present day location may be rotated to the past, based on the plate model, and with these paleo-spatial coordinates through time paleo grids of different data types at different ages may be sampled. This limits the sampling to times in the past for which paleo reconstructed datasets are available.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,229,950 discloses a Paleoneighborhood Hydrocarbon Spatial System that provides a paleogeographic search system locating geoscience data relevant to a geographic search aperture. This known paleogeographic search system comprises a geodatabase, an interface, a paleogeographic reconstruction engine, and a host processor. The paleogeographic engine is configured to transform the geographic search aperture according to tectonic plate movements to a transformed search aperture that the geographic search aperture occupied in a geological age of interest. The host processor is configured to apply a paleoaugmented geographic search aperture to a geodatabase for additional oil exploration data relevant to the geographic search aperture today. The paleoaugmented geographic search aperture is defined by augmenting the transformed search aperture to include relevant proximal locations for the selected geological age of interest to create an augmented transformed search area; and transforming the augmented transformed search aperture, according to tectonic plate movements, to the paleoaugmented geographic search aperture in present day world geography.
The system of U.S. Pat. No. 8,229,950 is found to comprise a complex iterative workflow, where a selected AOI is manually defined in present day and brought to the past while preserving the aperture shape of the AOI.
There is a need for a more efficient rigorous, structured and time efficient approach how to sample relevant areas and/or data in the paleo domain, which does not rely on paleo-geographies which have to be drafted for every time interval in the geological past. These paleo-geographies are current not available at a time and spatial resolution.
Furthermore there is a need for an improved paleogeographic reconstruction method and system, which does not require reconstruction of vast geospatial datasets into the geological past, thereby significantly reducing the computationally demands and associated computation errors and reducing the amount of time necessary to precondition additional new paleogeographic datasets.
Furthermore there is a need for an improved paleogeographic reconstruction engine with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that allows a user to create a user defined Paleo Event Table (PET) that displays a sampled paleogeographic dataset in a user friendly manner.